Instintively I knew that old saw about drinking 8 glasses of water was wrong. How could a human being, who can surivive on the savannahs of Africa on dew collected in the morning, be required to chug so much water they're peeing every 20 minutes? Why wouldn't I believe my own bodies signal of thirst? I tend to pay attention and trust other signals, like hunger, full bladder and so on.

And why would the human body be so inept at separating out the water from my coffee, tea, diet soda and whatever else I chose to drink? In truth, the people who say coffee, tea and so on are diuretics are only sort of right. They make you pee slightly more, but only if you're not accustomed to drinking them. And, if you drink a cup of coffee and it does work like a diuretic, it'll probably make you pee about 1 tablespoon more than you would normally.... not 5 gallons like the water-obsessed would have you believe.

There's a lot of mythology about water and "flushing out toxins" and "flushing out fat". Drink extra water doesn't flush anything in your body, although it does make you flush the toilet.

And here's another one, a weatherman on my news channel was saying something about drinking lots of water so your skin doesn't dry out. Ummm... I have to say, I can drink a small ocean of water and my skin will STILL be dry on cold, dry days. I don't think it works like that.

Then what about salt? I thought it was pretty well proven that only 10% of the population suffers from salt related hypertension, why are they telling everyone to cut back on salt if it only affects a minority of the people with high blood pressure?